1870s

I’m talking about history, again! – at the MCGS

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

I like to give illustrated talks about history, especially the history of the Jonathan Clark House, its occupants, their neighbors, and their lives in early Wisconsin territory and state. Back on Friday, April 24, 2026, I spoke to the members of the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society about the German immigrant experience in our area circa 1845–1910, as lived by the extended family of German immigrant—and 1868-1873 Clark House occupant and farmer—Fred Beckmann. The talk went well, and I’ve been invited to speak to the MCGS again, this Saturday, September 26, at 10:00 a.m., at Milwaukee’s Central Public Library Downtown.

Scenes from my previous MCGS presentation at the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, April, 2026. Photo credit: Laura Rexroth.

What’s it about?

This month’s MCGS presentation is titled From the ‘Burg to the Battlefield…and Back: A Local German-American Family and their Civil War Experiences.

The American Civil War is a huge topic, with many famous—and lesser-known—aspects, and no one talk can cover them all. So, rather than try and squeeze a grand overview of the war and its many battles into less than an hour, we will discuss some interesting and unusual aspects of the war—as experienced by some of Wisconsin’s German-American soldiers— that may have gotten lost over time. And we’ll do this by focusing on the Civil War experiences of one local family, the siblings and future in-laws of recent German immigrant Fred Beckmann.

You’re invited!

My Saturday, September 26, 2026, MCGS presentation will be held in the 1st floor Rotary Club of Milwaukee community meeting room of the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, 814 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee. The event will start with a short MCGS business meeting at 10:00 a.m. My presentation begins about 10:15 a.m. and will last about 45 minutes, followed by plenty of time for questions & answers. The meeting is free and open to the public, and I hope to see you all there.

Sound interesting? Click “continue reading” for more details.

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Monday, September 7th, is Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, and I thought I’d commemorate the day with a lightly-revised re-post of our annual CHH Labor Day piece that first appeared in 2023. To honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark Heritage & History, highlighting a few of the many skills, trades, and occupations common during the Clark House era.

Since it is a holiday, I’m not going to add long commentaries to each image. Enjoy the image galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open larger versions of each. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts for each topic; they are filled with more images and lots of information about the different skills, tools, and jobs of the Clark family era, and include full image credits.

“Labor”

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word labor? Perhaps big men doing hard work with their hands, at a factory, on a job site, or in a workshop? In its early decades—except for the first sawmills, grist mills, stone quarries (and a brewery or two)—rural Mequon didn’t have much in the way of factory work. (Fun fact: Jonathan Clark’s father-in-law Peter Turck set up the first business in the county, a sawmill on Pigeon Creek, in 1838. See the essay on Peter Turck by Clark House young historian Spencer Holloway on pages 4-5 of the Jonathan Clark House April, 2021, newsletter for more.)

Pioneer Mequon did have plenty of men that knew how to use tools to make, improve, or repair all sorts of things. Notably, the Bonniwell family was filled with skilled carpenters, shipbuilders and other tradesmen, and Jonathan Clark and many of his Mequon neighbors had experience surveying, cutting out roads, and building simple bridges and dams. Some of those Clark-era trades and tools are shown in these photos of 1840s-1860s workers and their tools:

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Memorial Day, 2026

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / Leave a comment

Lest We Forget

Our annual Memorial Day post, first published in 2020, more relevant with each passing year.

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, photo by Clayton B. Fraser, (Library of Congress), public domain. Memphis National Cemetery is the final resting place of Mequon’s Watson Peter Woodworth, and almost 14,000 of his Union Army comrades.

Today is the day our nation officially observes Memorial Day. For many Americans, Memorial Day represents “the first day of summer,” and is traditionally celebrated with trips to the lake, picnics, parades, and sales on cars, appliances, and other consumer goods.

But for many of us, Memorial Day remains rooted in its origins as Decoration Day. The first national observance was in 1868, when retired general John A. Logan, commander and chief of the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization—issued his General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a moment to remember what this day truly represents.

Continue reading →

I’m talking about history – at the MCGS

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

I like to talk about history, especially the history of the Jonathan Clark House, its occupants, and their lives in early Wisconsin territory and state. Sometimes I get invited to share my research with others, and I put together an illustrated presentation. This coming Friday, April 24, 2026, I’ll be talking to the members of the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society about the German immigrant experience in our area circa 1845–1910, as lived by the extended family of German immigrant, and Clark House occupant, Fred Beckmann.

You’re invited!

My April 24th MCGS presentation will be held in the 1st floor Rotary Club of Milwaukee community meeting room of the Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, 814 West Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee. The event will start with a short business meeting at 1:00 p.m. My presentation begins about 1:15 p.m. and will last about 45 minutes, followed by plenty of time for questions & answers. The meeting is free and open to the general public, and I hope to see you all there.

Is there more to say about Fred Beckmann?

Indeed there is!

As you may recall from earlier CHH blog posts like (this one) and (this one), Fred Beckmann and his new wife, Lena Hackfeld, lived in the Clark House, and farmed the Clark farm, from 1868 until 1873. Their story connects the history of the early Anglo-American settlement of Mequon with the subsequent influx of German-speaking immigrants to the area.

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Caroline M. (Clark) Woodward – profile, 1891

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

In our previous post I made use of a paragraph from a recently rediscovered 1891 profile of Jonathan and Mary (Turck) Clark’s eldest child, Caroline M. Clark, later Mrs. C. M. Woodward. Caroline was the most publicly active, visible, and well-documented of all of the Clark siblings, and we have published a number of blog posts on her life and career, including this comprehensive piece: Caroline M. (Clark) Woodward: a closer look at that 1893 biography. I recommend reading that post and clicking all the links; they lead you to other, detailed CHH posts about specific moments and events in Caroline’s life.

Today I’d like to share with you the complete 1891 profile that I quoted in our March 26, 2026, post. It originally appeared as one long column of text on page 1 of the Lincoln, Nebraska, “New Republic” newspaper, on August 20, 1891. Caroline (1840-1924) was fifty years old when this article appeared, and had another thirty years of active work in the temperance and women’s rights fields ahead of her.

Given the amount of accurate detail in the article, I suspect that the information came directly from Caroline herself. In fact, given how well-written and how accurate the whole profile is, I would not be surprised if Caroline wrote most, or all of it herself. For ease of reading, I have divided the article into several sections, created paragraph headers, and added a few notes on some of the facts mentioned in each section.

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Elizabeth Turck’s husband: Densmore W. Maxon (1820-1887)

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

The lives of Mary Clark’s sister Elizabeth (Turck) Maxon, her husband Densmore W. Maxon, and the Maxon children are deeply intertwined with the history of Washington and Ozaukee counties, and with the lives of many of the early settlers, especially the Clark, Turck and Clow families.

From the early 1840s until at least the 1880s, members of the Maxon family—and especially D. W. Maxon— played important, recurring roles in Clark and Turck family affairs. That being the case, I thought we might benefit from a reasonably detailed overview of D. W. Maxon’s life, and I found a good one in A. M. Thomson’s A Political History of Wisconsin, second edition (C. N. Caspar Company, Milwaukee, 1902).

D. W. Maxon

The biography spans pages 431-433. D. W. Maxon’s portrait, with signature (above), is found facing page 236. I have proofread the transcribed text and added some paragraph breaks and headers for ease of reading. Otherwise the text, displayed here in grey-background “quotation” paragraphs, is complete as published in 1902.

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“Dashing through the snow…”

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

As I write this, southeastern Wisconsin is in the midst of our first substantial snowfall of Winter, 2025-2026. In Jonathan and Mary Clark’s lifetime, the day after a storm like this meant it was time to hitch up the sleigh and have some fun “dashing through the snow.” Here’s a lightly-revised and expanded repeat of a post that celebrates Clark-era “sleighing time” and “jingle bells.” (And be sure to click the highlighted links for more vintage wintertime images and info.)

Kimmel and Forster, publishers, “Winter Pleasure in the Country,” circa 1865. National Museum of American History, Peters Prints Collection, Smithsonian Institution.1 Note the modest straps of jingle bells on the one-horse sleigh and the much more ostentatious—and louder—straps of bells on the two-horse sleigh.

Last winter, our earlier CHH posts Snow!, Shoveling out -and other winter chores and Stuff Happens – on a sleigh ride, got me wondering again about winter travel in old Washington/Ozaukee county during the Clarks’ era of the mid-1830s through the 1860s or so. Assuming most of the more successful farmers—such as the Clarks, Bonniwells and Turcks—owned a one- or two-horse sleigh, how easy was it to navigate that sleigh on the early county roads? Could you sleigh ride all the way to Milwaukee? And if you could, how long might that take?

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Labor Day – a photo essay

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

UPDATE: This was supposed to go out on Monday. I hit “publish” before the piece was ready. Here’s the updated 2025 version for your reading enjoyment. Sorry for any confusion (and, for you CHH subscribers, the premature email in your inbox).

Monday, September 1st, is Labor Day, the holiday celebrating the working men and women of our nation, and I thought I’d commemorate the day with a lightly-revised re-post of this CHH piece from 2023. This Labor Day, as in 2023, I have to work a shift at our local mercantile establishment. You know, a store kind of like this one, only much bigger, stocked with just about anything you need for modern living:

Like many Americans, I don’t have the day “off” on Monday, and won’t be marching in a parade, but I’d still like to honor the holiday and salute the American worker, past and present. With that in mind, let’s revisit some of the nineteenth-century occupations we’ve talked about previously at Clark House Historian, highlighting a few of the many skills, trades, and occupations common during the Clark House era.

Since it is a holiday, I’m not going to add long commentaries to each photo. Enjoy the photo galleries, and be sure to click each gallery—and photo—to open and peruse larger versions of each image. And click the highlighted links to visit the original CHH posts, filled with lots more information about the different skills, tools, and jobs, and the full image credits.

Continue reading →

Memorial Day, 2025

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins.

Lest We Forget

Our annual Memorial Day post, first published in 2020, more relevant with each passing year.

Graves of Unknown Union Soldiers, Memphis National Cemetery, photo by Clayton B. Fraser, (Library of Congress), public domain. Memphis National Cemetery is the final resting place of Mequon’s Watson Peter Woodworth, and almost 14,000 of his Union Army comrades.

Today is the day our nation officially observes Memorial Day. For many Americans, Memorial Day represents “the first day of summer,” and is traditionally celebrated with trips to the lake, picnics, parades, and sales on cars, appliances, and other consumer goods.

But for many of us, Memorial Day remains rooted in its origins as Decoration Day. The first national observance was in 1868, when retired general John A. Logan, commander and chief of the Grand Army of the Republic—the Union veterans’ organization—issued his General Order Number 11, designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

On this Memorial Day, let’s take a moment to remember what this day truly represents.

Continue reading →

JCH Sources: a look a local histories, part 2

/ Genealogist & Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

This is the second part of a multi-part look at local (Mequon and Washington/Ozaukee County) history sources. If you missed Part 2, I recommend you click this link and read that first.

In today’s post, I’d like to guide you to and through another one of the local histories that I’ve bumped into over the last decade or so. As in Part 1, I’ll include a link to a PDF copy of the source, make comments on the range and quality of the information in the book, and sum it up with an overall grade for accuracy, style, and usefulness.

“All sources lie.” — Lawrence of Arabia (supposedly)

That provocative quote begins the forward of Elizabeth Shown Mills’s monumental Evidence Explained (third edition, revised, 2017), the “Bible” of genealogical research, source evaluation, and modern citation practices. It makes an arresting opening for her almost 900-page book, devoted to historical and genealogical sources and how to cite them.1 But what does the author mean by beginning her book with Lawrence’s (supposed) quote? Here is part of her explanation:

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